Battered vegetables, pale fruit… One third of products made for human consumption does not end up being eaten. France wastes or bins 17 million tons of food every year. But this could be changing. For many months now we have seen a series of “anti-waste” initiatives in supermarkets. People may also have noticed a little red sticker of a toothless apple in hypermarkets or grocery stores. This is the Gueules Cassées sticker. It represents fruit and vegetables that are degraded for aesthetic reasons, and therefore have 30% off the price.
Nicolas Chabanne is co-founder of Gueles Cassées and he is still astonished at the success of his initiative which is even being talked about in the USA, Japan and Brazil. The idea led to certain professionals contacting them, “We were in fruit and vegetables but confectioners, butchers and bakers, rang to tell us ‘we also have our own ‘gueules cassées’ (broken faces). Everyone said, ‘it’s universal’. There is an ocean of products that are thrown out every year. But there is not a brand.”
So, Nicolas Chabanne took a risk and made that brand. To begin he had two types of products : cheese with slightly irregular edges and cereals, which seemed to have no abnormalities at a glance, but when looked at very very closely did not fulfil the norms.
“A specific brand to commercialise waste? That could work, or even, it will work,” says Xavier Hua, General Delegate for ECR, an association regrouping industrials and retailers. But the food industry will need to adapt to it.
ADEME, the government agency which notably works against wastage, reminds us that the EU relaxed calibre rules back in 2009…yet the behaviour of the consumer and retailers hasn’t changed. The success of ugly fruit and vegetables does not necessarily mean that we’ve found an end to wastage.